157065 - Copy copies text attributes

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 64647

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, defect)

Description

[Jerry Baker]

Find some formatted text (bold, <h1>, etc.) on a Web page and highlight and copy
it. Open a mail compose window and paste it. Notice that the text attributes are
present also. There appears to be no way to stop this.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The way to stop this is not to compose messages in HTML.  If you _are_ composing
a message in HTML and you copy a chunk of HTML into it, we should copy the
formatting, should we not?

Comment 2

[Jerry Baker]

My experience may not be the norm, but I cannot think of a time that I even once
wanted to copy the actual attributes on text from a Web page.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Say you copy a table out of the page.  Would you want it to paste as a table or
as a bunch of text?

Comment 4

[Jerry Baker]

Maybe I am just way too used to NN4, but I would use view source to copy if I
wanted anything besides the actual words. Maybe Mozilla can do something like a
lot of editors do and allow "Paste unformatted"

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

That would be bug 64647; I'm leaving it to your discretion to decide whether
this is a dup...

Comment 6

[Kathleen :Brade]

if you don't want the formatting you can select it and choose Format > Remove
Text Styles (accel-shift Y).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 64647 ***

Comment 7

[sujay]

verified.

Comment 8

[Kathleen :Brade]

reassign in case bugs are later reopened

Comment 9

[Jerry Baker]

Using Firefox, this behavior is carried across to other applications where i
*cannot* choose to disable HTML. Try copying some text from a Web page and
pasting it into Notepad. You will get spaces where there are none in your
selection because Firefox grabs the spaces from the underlying source. This is
stupid behavior because it means it is impossible to copy what you have actually
selected.

Should I reopen this bug, or open a new one?

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Sounds like a separate bug to me (conversion into plaintext flavor, not HTML
flavor).

But note that there are existing bugs on this (eg on display:none elements
ending up in the pasted output).  You might want to check those out before filing.